Giants of the Monsoon Forest
Living and Working with Elephants

For those who appreciate elephants, Giants of the Monsoon Forest is stunning. Jacob Shell studied Asian elephants in the area between Burma, India and China. He has divided the stories into functional areas. So there are chapters on work elephants, fording elephants, war, transport and flooding. The......more

Elephants were around since 400 B.C. A picture of combat elephants hangs in the Philadelphia museum of Art. Elephants from Africa are much smaller than the Asian Elephants. They work well with their handlers, (manhouts) and can respond to at least 4 different languages. In the Asian forest,teak wood is......more

Jacob Shell is a geographer who read widely and travelled to visited a complex array of South Asian and Indochinese (prominently in Burma) peoples who work with elephants. Pushed to the mountains by historical waves of lowland conquests in the region, the geography led to an evolution of work elepha......more

For a book about elephants....a little dry. The descriptions of how the elephants work , adapt, and interact with humans was pretty extraordinary though it was a bit hard to picture what the author was describing at times. There was also a lot of filler. Some of it was good; the description of how t......more

Interesting book and learned so much about elephants and the work they do in Asia. Being required to read it for class made it harder to enjoy.......more